Education woes

Dipankar Gupta has an article in the India Today special issue called ‘Transforming India’ (dated 06th Oct). Some of the numbers from his piece do make for interesting reading:

India spends around 45 billion USD on Research and Development (he doesn’t specify what exactly counts as R&D, but those line items should be available somewhere)

From 1990 till 1998, the spend on R&D and Technology Training came down from INR 219 crore to INR 156 crore (note: 10 million make a crore)

The global rank of some of the institutes are as follows: IITs (50th), IIMs (84th) and JNU (192nd)

He goes on to add that India doesn’t cut a dashing figure in the Scopus Index as well.

There would be more such numbers available to show that

the country isn’t doing enough by means of policy and implementation to encourage basic science and technology

the country isn’t getting its act together to ensure primary education is being delivered correctly

State run/sponsored/funded schools still take in a large segment of the student population. And, various schemes notwithstanding, the schools have a systemic problem in terms of delivery of content and availability of teachers.